Saudi Aramco’s Khurais Producing Department (KhPD) and Abqaiq Plants Operation Department (APOD) awarded for excellence by the Frost and Sullivan’s Manufacturing Leadership Council. This years’ event was held in Carlsbad, California, and saw KhPD receive two awards under the category of Sustainable Leadership and Engineering, and Production Technology Leadership, while APOD earned its award under the newly-introduced category of the Big Data and Advanced Analytics Leadership. KhPD’s Sustainabilty Leadership Achievements KhPD’s award for Sustainability Leadership recognized Khurais’ resource and energy optimization efforts over the last three years. In this time, KhPD improved its energy intensity performance, groundwater conservation efforts, environmental compliance and flare minimization efforts. In recent years, KhPD has proactively handled sustainability challenges. It has instituted a culture of effective performance monitoring, adapted to and adopted industrially-accepted best practices, established KPIs to measure sustainability performance, and assessed fit-for-purpose technology for possible deployment. And the results speak for themselves. The KhPD 2014 energy intensity index has dropped significantly by beating annual corporate targets for four years in a row. KhPD also maintained good levels of fugitive emissions such as SOx, NOx and H2S in 2014. Wash water consumption index and flare minimization targets also favorably exceeded the corporate-mandated levels. Engineering and Production Technology Leadership Achievements KhPD’s second award under Engineering and Production Technology Leadership recognized Khurais’ development and deployment of its innovative integrated analytical engineering performance monitoring tool. The tool, which recently earned a U.S. patent, goes beyond typical monitoring systems and has become key for the ongoing operational excellence efforts at KhPD; such as energy conservation, crude yield enhancement, resource optimization and equipment efficiency. It performs incentive evaluation or lost opportunity assessment (by measuring additional revenue, energy savings, and resource conservation); provides diagnostic and advisory capabilities that help engineers and operators make the right decisions to close performance gaps; and prioritizing which initiatives to implement. APOD’s Big Data and Advanced Analytics Achievements APOD’s winning project was the implementation of an innovative, first-of-its-kind energy KPI system at Abqaiq Plants that was developed in-house and has been filed as a patent. The system transforms huge amounts of operational data into predictive and actionable insights for the operation team. The system is used as an operational and engineering tool to supervise and improve energy performance. The system explores energy consumption at the equipment level and provides advisory intelligence to the operators for further adjustment. When detecting an energy KPI anomaly, the system automatically point outs which process/equipment caused the anomaly, the root cause and corrective actions, and the operating unit responsible for the corrective actions. The new system embeds engineers’ process knowledge, operation experience, KPI familiarity, and analytical skills to identify the causes of energy deficiency and what actions are required to remedy the deficiency. This approach reflects realistic production scenarios and saves time when troubleshooting KPI deviation issues. The system performs gap and root cause analysis by analyzing historical and real-time plant data and events.